Seeing Films Politically

In this bold political rethinking of contemporary film theory, Zavarzadeh overturns the dominant concepts that fetishize film as a work of art or simple entertainment. He demonstrates how aesthetic notions obscure the ideological effects produced by viewing films, particularly the production of the spectator as the subject of social class. Seeing films, he argues, is part of the political struggle over cultural intelligibilities, subjectivities, and representations. One of the book’s analytical innovations is its concept of renarrating: a reading strategy that displays the logic of the film, showing that it is not so much a unique aesthetic articulation as it is the common logic of the dominant ideology. In a series of brilliant readings of recent films, the book constructs a critical space for the reader to not only see the culturally visible tale of the film-the one that legitimates the existing reality, the status quo-but also to see the other, suppressed tale that (de)narrates the social contradictions arising from exploitation and class rule.